I think customers are looking for functionality, ROI and easy-to-use, which is to be detailed.Existing investments are the "enemy" you know, but many databases had been dumped even in favor of open source.

At least the current generation of America's Cup sailboats has reversed the game going downwind. AC72s are so fast that they're sailing close-hauled downwind using their forward apparent wind. Thus the leading boat downwind gives the follower bad air - speed has changed the game completely ;-)

This is all technical, technical, technical (and, I agree, important and yet to be detailed by Oracle), but buyers/decision makers want to know about business benefits, business benefits, business benefits. Oracle is saying, "you'll be able to leverage your existing investment in technology, training and people while getting all the speed and performance business benefits you need." Do you think they'll respond to the argument "we've made it less important for developers to decide where the application logic should reside"?

What about the application side?SAP has re-written the Business Suite on HANA which simplified table structures and plumbing and if customers want to upgrade there are rapid-deployment solutions.

Some other points:1) As you know, HANA is more than a database. As a platform it includes application server components.Ethan Jewett wrote recently: "Part of the reason for this new design direction is that it relieves some of the latency and bandwidth bottleneck between the database and the application server, making it less important for developers to decide where the application logic should reside."

2) Vishal Sikka said, HANA was "designed from the ground up to take advantage of the massive power of multi core processor. Parallelism that can be exploited with multi core processor. The traditional databases were not designed to do that." Performance advantage or not?

3) Apart from backup, HANA has, as you wrote, a single store of data whichmeans one copy of data whereas Oracle 12c has two in the DRAM as well as flash and disk storage. How many layers, how much administration and plumbing will you have?

Oracle database exec Andy Mendelsohn revealed on Monday that In-Memory option is in "pre-beta" and will be released "some time next year." Hoping for details on which quarter or, at least, which half of next year.

From what I know based on various interviews over recent years, migrating from Oracle database to Hana isn't that complicated for SAP customers (training and tooling issues aside) if you stick with how things ran before. But if you want to take advantage of "radical simplification," as SAP calls it, you have to change the database model, getting rid of all sorts of indexes, aggregates and joints, etc. As a result, you have to change how the application and various related reports operate. In other words, the more radical the simplification, the more disruptive the change will be. It's a one-time pain, to be sure, but I'm thinking Oracle's promise of continuity will win over many, many Oracle customers who also run SAP apps. It may be less clean/simple than everything in RAM, but that price tag might be painful.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.